Israelis in Anguish Over the Abuse and Murder of a 4-Year-Old

JERUSALEM — Israel is in the grip of a nightmarish tale of cross-generational infidelity, child abuse and murder. The story is blanketing the news media while police detectives speak of never having been so shaken by a case, and an anguished nation is asking how it could happen here, in a society that considers itself especially caring and intimate.

The story centers on the killing of a blue-eyed, four-year-old French girl named Rose, her guileless smile haunting the front page of every newspaper. The police say she was killed by her grandfather, a 45-year-old Israeli who had lured her mother away from his own son, the dead girl’s father, to be his lover. They say the man has confessed to having stuffed the child’s body into a red suitcase and dumped it into a river. Divers are searching.

Those are the bare outlines, but the details of familial dysfunction over many years, recounted by the police and lawyers in news conferences, only add to the horror that has so gripped Israelis.

Their relationship began four years ago when Marie and her husband, Benjamin, Mr. Ron’s biological son, came with the infant Rose from France to meet him. They had learned that Mr. Ron was his father when Benjamin’s mother, who raised him alone in France, told them that she had become pregnant while on a tour of Israel years ago.

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Ronny Ron, an unemployed taxi driver, is accused of killing his four-year-old granddaughter, in a case that has the country rapt in the nightmarish tale. Mr. Ron, was living with the girls mother, 23-year-old Marie Pisam. Credit
Roni Schutzer/European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Ron welcomed the teenage couple and infant daughter, but soon he and Ms. Pisam announced their love for each other, and Benjamin returned to France alone with Rose. His father and Ms. Pisam set up house and had two daughters. Meanwhile, the police say that Benjamin was a negligent father in France and that Rose was often in the care of welfare authorities.

About a year ago Ms. Pisam heard of Rose’s condition and sought custody of her, which she got in December, and brought her here. But it turned out that Rose had severe emotional and behavioral problems, speaking little and unable to form attachments. Ms. Pisam and Mr. Ron did not know how to care for her and took to leaving her with Mr. Ron’s mother, Vivian Yaakov.

It was not easy for Ms. Yaakov, either, and she kept asking her son to find a better solution. After a dispute between them in May, Mr. Ron apparently took Rose away. Ms. Yaakov said this was the last time she saw the child. It was she who several weeks ago approached child welfare authorities in Israel with her concern. That led the police to Mr. Ron’s house and ultimately to his confession, they say.

But Mr. Ron apparently told the police a number of different stories about what happened next. The one he has told more than once, they say, is that in the car he hit Rose because she was being difficult and when he realized that she had stopped moving, her head hanging unnaturally, he stuffed her in a suitcase and threw her in the Yarkon River. Other stories he told involved selling Rose to Palestinians in the West Bank, giving her to a Jewish seminary and giving her to a French convent.

Police officials spent recent weeks checking out all those possibilities but seem most focused on the river search, where television news stations have positioned live cameras. Until Tuesday, the story was under a court gag order. It was partially lifted then and became fully lifted Wednesday.

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Marie Pisam appears in court in Ramle, Israel. Pisam, a French woman who had immigrated to Israel, is accused of conspiracy to murder her daughter.Credit
Roni Schutzer/European Pressphoto Agency

It is unclear what role the girl’s mother played in the death or whether it was planned. No one has yet been charged, but under the Israeli legal system, serious suspects’ names are publicized and their movements are restricted while police build their case.

Whatever the outcome of the investigation, it is hard to come up with an example of a story that has so dominated news coverage as this one has in the past two days. Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest selling daily newspaper, devoted its first 17 pages to it on Wednesday under the headline, “Rose, the girl that no one wanted.” Equally amazing, Haaretz, a liberal intellectual daily that has often given limited coverage to such stories, ran a full eight-column headline (“Grandfather tells police: I killed Rose”) across the top of its front and a total of 10 articles on the case.

It is clear that apart from the sheer voyeuristic lure of the grisly details, the story has taken hold of Israelis who are asking themselves how a 4-year-old, even a foreign one not registered in a school here, could fall between the cracks of a society in such a way that no one noticed her mistreatment or, indeed, her disappearance for months.

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“Israelis like to tell each other that in America you can fall in the street and nobody will care,” remarked Oded Ben Ami, host of a daily 6 p.m. news broadcast on Channel 2, whose ratings spiked on Tuesday as he focused on the case. “Now we fear this is happening to us here. Rose is bringing us back together in horror and grief.”

Yigal Palmor, a Foreign Ministry official who spent years posted in Spain and France, agreed, saying Israelis tend to think of themselves as more caring and tightly knit than other societies and this has shaken them.

“It is very neighborly and informal in Israel, sometimes to the annoyance of people from other cultures,” he said. “If you fall in the street, not only will a crowd gather but you will get very specific advice because in the crowd someone’s brother-in-law is a doctor who once had a case like this. We think of this as a place where everyone is in everyone else’s business. Yet this happened here.”